Quotes About Ayn Rand

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Here's a free tip," his father says: "The feds aren't terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn't be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I'm going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won't bring her up again if you don't.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it.

She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)

The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil)," observes Ayn Rand, "except a share of its failures and crimes. . . ."17

From Ayn Rand to bushy anarchists there is an occasional agreement on means called libertarianism, which is a faith in laissez-faire politics/economics.... How to hate your government on principle.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand stated that there's no such thing as real altruism. She espoused the principle of ethical egotism, meaning that a person's moral obligation is to promote their own welfare. Translation? I still have the musical sensibilities of a teenage girl and I kind of want to see a shitty pop concert in the guise of doing something nice for my pal's kid, so I need to find a way to make it happen.

I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.

Ayn Rand was the godmother of laissez faire capitalism, the Virgin Mary of Libertarianism. She died in 1982. She spent her life attempting to turn selfishness into a religion so that people could claim their greed was grounded in the nature of man. Her heinous ideas and crappy books have given politicians philosophical cover to promote their "greed is good" agenda for decades.

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.

Now, I happen to be an Ayn Rand enthusiast, the philosopher-author whose caustic but penetrating eye espied some factors in society normally overlooked by a lot of people. In her philosophical tracts and in her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged

I think I view the system the same way that Ayn Rand views the system - that it really oppresses those that create, if you will, and tries to take away from those that produce and give to the non-producers.

Madonna taught me more philosophy than Ayn Rand.

At Stanford he read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and was seduced by Ayn Rand's romantic view of free-market capitalism as well as her view of businessmen as heroic.

Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas (1951) In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts

Ayn Rand brings the best and the worst animal instinct out in humans. Well, excuse me, I aspire to be further evolved ethically than that. I really believe that Ayn Rand is the Marilyn Monroe of philosophy--all seduction, little substance.

I guard my treasures: my thoughts, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.

Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.

My position is that Rand doesn't have all the right answers, but she does have all the right questions